Orwell's Revenge

by Peter Huber

  Still others will reply that Orwell couldn’t have been wrong, because he wasn’t really prophesying. But Orwell himself was characteristically direct on that point. “I do not believe that the kind of society I describe [in 1984] necessarily will arrive,” he wrote in a letter to Francis A. Hen-son, “but I believe (allowing of course for the fact that the book is a satire) that something resembling it could arrive.” No, Orwell wasn’t seriously prophesying that England would be renamed Airstrip One, or that the dominant political culture in Asia would be called Obliteration of Self. But Orwell was prophesying nonetheless, prophesying in a grand, allegorical way about what might be, what very well might be, when industrialism and electronics inevitably converged. As Michael Shelden notes, the picture Orwell paints in 1984 “is so realistic and compelling that readers from his day onward have come away from the novel feeling that they have been given a prediction.” The book is satire, but it is also the distilled vision of a man who had been building a grand prophecy about the machine and the Ministry throughout his career as a writer.

  It will also be said—correctly again—that whatever his failings as a social prophet, Orwell was a fine artist. “Beauty is meaningless until it is shared,” Orwell wrote in Burmese Days. For any work of art there is only one test worth bothering about: survival. By this test Orwell’s telescreen succeeded, even if the people who remember it hardly think of it as a machine at all. It is an electronic monster, but at any rate it exists. The emotional impact of 1984 is as strong today as it was when Orwell wrote the book in 1948. Orwell shared the beauty and the ugliness he saw as successfully as any other artist of his century.

  Which means—as Orwell himself said of Dickens, Dali, and Kipling—that Orwell was a “good-bad” artist, a genius and a fool too. Folly does not negate genius, of course. The views that a writer holds must be compatible with sanity, in the medical sense, and with the power of continuous thought; beyond that what we ask of him is talent, which is probably another name for conviction. Orwell did not possess ordinary wisdom, but he did possess a terrible intensity of vision, capable of picking out a single hidden truth and then magnifying it and distorting it. The durability of 1984 goes to show that if the force of belief is behind it, a worldview that only just passes the test of sanity is sufficient to produce a great work of art. Orwell was indeed a great artist. But he was still wrong about the entire technophobic scaffold on which 1984 is draped.

  Orwell’s defenders may perhaps reply, finally, that I am taking the details of 1984 too seriously. 1984 is satire, after all, and it’s a waste of time to quibble about its footnotes. But the telescreen is not a detail in 1984, and to challenge Orwell’s pessimism about its effect on society is not to quibble.

  Misunderstanding the machine is—in Orwell’s own view—a grave error, at least in a writer who is trying to make a serious social statement. Jonathan Swift’s treatment of science and machinery in Gulliver’s Travels is “irrelevant and even silly,” Orwell writes, because for Swift, “science was merely a kind of futile muckraking and machines were nonsensical contraptions that would never work.” Dickens “shows no interest either in the details of machinery or in the things machinery can do,” Orwell complains, pointing to such things as the telegraph and the breech-loading gun, which first appeared in Dickens’s lifetime and “made the modern world possible.” Tennyson, like Dickens, “lack[s] the mechanical faculty,” but he at least “can see the social possibilities of machinery.” H. G. Wells and Bernard Shaw are “the ‘progressives,’ the yea-sayers, . . . always leaping forward to embrace the ego-projections which they mistake for the future.”

  Orwell attacks the techno-utopianism of H. G. Wells at some length. His main target is The Sleeper Awakes, which fails, according to Orwell, because Wells misconstrues the social effects of technology. The book portrays a privileged hedonistic class and slave laborers who “toil like troglodytes in caverns underground.” Orwell rejects this as internally inconsistent:

  [I]n the immensely mechanised world that Wells is imagining, why should the workers have to work harder than at present? Obviously the tendency of the machine is to eliminate work, not to increase it. In the machine-world the workers might be enslaved, ill-treated and even underfed, but they certainly would not be condemned to ceaseless manual toil; because in that case what would be the function of the machine?

  Orwell has higher praise for Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Huxley, at least, “has seen through the swindle of ‘progress.’” His book “probably expresses what a majority of thinking people feel about machine-civilisation.”

  Orwell, in short, ranks, grades, and criticizes other writers according to how well they grasp the social implications of new technology This is exactly as one would expect: the impact of technology on society is the central and most enduring theme of Orwell’s own books and essays about the totalitarian state. Time and again in his writings, Orwell alludes to radios and bombs, machine guns and Hollywood films, gramophones and the secret police, with machine and misery invariably juxtaposed in just that way. The specter of the telescreen is central to 1984; Big Brother without his electronic gadget is like the Wizard of Oz at the end of Oz: harmless, trivial, even silly once the curtain and the smoke-machine have been knocked aside. Orwell takes his machines very seriously indeed. In fairness to Orwell, we must too.

  Finally, Orwell’s misconceptions about electronic machines must be taken seriously if only because 1984 is such an important book, if only because Orwell’s legacy is as serious as literary legacies come. To this day you cannot engage in any major debate about communication technology without stumbling across 1984—the vocabulary, the imagery, the whole techno-dystopic vision, soup to nuts. “Kipling is the only English writer of our time who has added phrases to the language,” Orwell once wrote. But Orwell has out-Kipled Kipling. If the word “Orwellian” is to remain a vitally evocative part of the English vocabulary—as it likely will for centuries to come—then we have a responsibility to ourselves, and to posterity, to understand just what that word evokes and why the real vision—the one behind the curtain, behind the “oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror”—is so much less frightening than Orwell’s original. We have a responsibility to examine with some care just how wrong Orwell really was.

  And on the subject of the telescreen, Orwell was very wrong indeed.

  • • •

  He was wrong, to start with, about Ignorance and Strength. He believed that monopoly ownership of the electronic media was economically inevitable. But it wasn’t, and isn’t. “[T]he tendency of capitalism is to slow down the process of invention and improvement,” Orwell wrote in 1937, “because under capitalism any invention which does not promise fairly immediate profits is neglected; some, indeed, which threaten to reduce profits are suppressed almost as ruthlessly as the flexible glass mentioned by Petronius.” Flexible glass? For someone (like me) who first read those words in the year 1984, the irony is unusually rich. The telescreen revolution was in fact propelled by a radically new kind of flexible glass called optical fiber. Fiber was developed and commercialized in the late 1970s by a private, capitalistic, for-profit American corporation, Coming. But there is no monopoly anymore in the manufacture of flexible glass, still less in its telecommunicating uses.

  Orwell was equally wrong about the socialists’ advantage in developing powerful technology. He believed that “the rate of mechanical progress will be much more rapid once Socialism is established.” But it was precisely because the capitalists did subject their technology to the discipline of the market that their machines advanced much faster. “Every strategic Plan, every tactical method, even every weapon will bear the stamp of the social system that produced it,” Orwell writes in The Lion and the Unicorn. Precisely so. And the only social system capable of producing something as ingenious as a telescreen is Western liberalism. It is not Mao, not Stalin, not Kim II Sung, not Big Brother who dwells inside the telescreen. Inside every telescreen live ten thousand free
-minded hackers, wonks, nerds, and phone phreaks—young men and women who nursed as infants on empirical habits of thought, who thrive on science and objective truth, and who believe with unshakable conviction that two plus two equals four. They love gadgets and they understand freedom—understand it better, perhaps, than many a young aristocrat studying classics at Eton.

  Orwell was wrong, too, about America’s drift toward totalitarianism, though not as completely wrong as Americans might have wished. Joseph McCarthy began his unAmerican-Activities witch-hunts in 1950, a year after 1984 was published. Then came Vietnam. “Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification.” Orwell wrote that sentence in 1946. Still, Senate committees and napalm notwithstanding, Orwell overestimated the fascists in America, and he underestimated America’s proles. “[W]hat instance is there of a modem industrialised state collapsing unless conquered from the outside by military force?” Orwell asked in 1943. Today we have our answer: Eurasia itself—Hungary, Poland, Rumania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Albania, and finally, the land of Stalin, the former Soviet Union. Whether “democratic socialists” like it or not, America’s peaceful, steadfast, more-or-less liberal, free market capitalism was responsible for that historic, bloodless victory over the oligarchical collectivists.

  Orwell was every bit as wrong about War and Peace. He believed that “only socialist nations can fight effectively” But the liberal capitalists, it turned out, could fight wars the same way as they developed machines and sold cereal—frugally, efficiently, with smarter weapons and fewer casualties, at least when one counted the casualties among their own ranks. They still can. Neither the atom bomb nor the cruise missile was developed by collectivists.

  Finally, Orwell was wrong—fundamentally wrong—about Freedom and Slavery. He was wrong in thinking that the “miracles” of “electrical science” are “cheap palliatives” and useless “luxuries.” It was television that exposed McCarthy, swarthy and sweating, as he hectored and slandered his witnesses. It was television again that showed us the naked little girl fleeing the napalm, and the picture of the Vietcong soldier with a pistol at his temple. As Orwell correctly anticipated in 1946: “People are . . . shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements.” On television, however, the “unreliable element” cringing in front of the pistol looked too much like a man for proletarian American stomachs, and the killing stopped.

  The man and the pistol brought home a fundamental fact about the technology of communication: better communicating machines produce more—not less—communication, more—not less—free expression, more—not less—political involvement, more—not less— freedom of thought. This is one of those plain, unmistakable facts so easily shirked by a man—especially a political man like Orwell—who in another part of his mind is aware of those facts. And if that last criticism of Orwell seems harsh, I can only say that the sentence (or at least a sentence very much like it) was written by Orwell himself, in a 1946 column titled “In Front of Your Nose.” Orwell invented the telescreen long before the engineers had come close, and then stared at it for the better part of three years—and still missed its most salient feature. Telescreen technology gives far more freedom than it takes.

  Orwell imagined the world of Stalin filled with Apple computers and concluded that it would be more horrible than any ever before imagined. He was wrong. Orwell understood Stalin perfectly. What he did not understand was the telescreen.

  • • •

  And that is still a very puzzling thing. Orwell, the man who always— always!—kept in mind that the first one now shall later be last, somehow never did grasp that the electronic sword would become a plowshare. Orwell saw the microphone-radio-gramophone-film machine statically. His telescreen was a machine that had stopped growing. It was already finished and perfect, set in a single unchangeable social structure, like a painting or a piece of furniture. His telescreen (one might say) had no mental life of its own. It did not evolve. It did not develop in unexpected ways. It contained no happy surprises. Orwell’s attack on it was written from the standpoint—perhaps this seems a queer thing to say of the author of 1984—of a man who lacked imagination.

  With the telescreen, to put the matter bluntly, Orwell’s failure was a failure of doublethink.

  DOUBLETHINK

  Man “is a noble animal and life is worth living,” Orwell declares in his 1946 essay, “Politics vs Literature.” Man also stands “aghast at the horror of existence.” “The human body is beautiful: it is also repulsive and ridiculous.” “The sexual organs are objects of desire and also of loathing.” “Meat is delicious, but a butcher’s shop makes one feel sick: and indeed all our food springs ultimately from dung and dead bodies, the two things which of all others seem to us the most horrible.” Orwell loves writing sentences like these.

  Indeed, he constructs paragraphs, pages, and entire books in much the same way. He is fascinated by artistic contradiction, the “good bad book” like a Sherlock Holmes story), good-bad poetry like Kipling’s), the brilliant-disgusting art of Salvador Dali. He wrestles with incongruities, he savors paradox, he recognizes the duality of everything. He engages, in other words, in the intelligent man’s doublethink, which allows him “to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancel out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic.” As one of his contemporaries acutely noted, “Mr. Orwell likes his friends no better than his enemies.” That is in fact much of the fun in reading Orwell; if you read enough of him, he’ll show you both sides of everything.

  Consider Orwell’s views about Adam Smith’s England—the land of human blimps, decayed aristocrats, and bank officials with “prehensile bottoms.” A terrible place, England, and also a blessed isle that Orwell loves better than any other place on the planet. When the revolution comes, when the stock exchange is pulled down and the Eton and Harrow match is forgotten, “England will still be England, an everlasting animal stretching into the future and the past, and, like all living things, having the power to change out of recognition and yet remain the same.” That’s doublethink, all right: the thing contains its own opposite, and the end of a nation is also its beginning.

  And then there’s America, the America of 1984. Recall that the expanded America—Oceania—is the third sheaf of com, the third totalitarian superstate, which by 1984 has replaced the pound with the dollar and renamed England Airstrip One. An evil place, America. Or is it? On the last page of 1984, at the end of the Appendix on the structure of Newspeak, we suddenly stumble across a familiar text: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”I What on earth is that doing here? Well, Orwell’s ostensible purpose is to explain how “it would have been quite impossible to render this into Newspeak while keeping to the sense of the original.” But Orwell never chooses his texts by accident. So Orwell, the man who frequently sneers at the American speculator, embezzler, millionaire, cereal-eating hotel guest, tee-totaling missionary, and English-killing new-speaker, leaves us, on the last page of 1984, with the words of Thomas Jefferson ringing in our ears. Orwell, we discover, admires American liberty. The theory at least. What he doesn’t care for is the practice. American liberty begins with “a buoyant, carefree quality that you can feel . . . like a physical sensation in your belly.” But in the end, American freedom is betrayed by “the rise of large-scale industry and the exploiting of cheap immigrant labour.”

  For Orwell, the glory of being human is to doublethink your way through everything, even human love. All the human relations in 2984 progress from trust to betrayal. Throughout the book, Winston is haunted by the memory of his adored mother, whose death he somehow caused when, as a child, he stole a piece of chocolate intended for his starving little sister. There is something about O’Brien that in
spires intimacy; Winston confides in him; O’Brien is then unmasked as a faithful member of the Party. Charrington, the softly spoken, sixty-year-old owner of the junk shop, is “frail and bowed, with a long, benevolent nose, and mild eyes distorted by thick spectacles.” He has “a vague air of intellectuality, as though he had been some kind of literary man, or perhaps a musician.” He turns out to be a member of the Thought Police.

  And how about Julia? At first Winston hates her as much as he desires her; his fantasy is to flog her with a rubber truncheon. Then they are ecstatically in love. “The one thing that matters,” Winston says to Julia, “is that we shouldn’t betray one another. . . . If they could make me stop loving you—that would be the real betrayal.”

  “They can’t do that,” Julia replies. “That’s the one thing they can’t do.”

  Winston agrees. “If you can feel that staying human is worth while, even when it can’t have any result whatever, you’ve beaten them.”

  Later, when the two lovers confide in O’Brien, the question of loyalty comes up again. When pressed by O’Brien, both Winston and Julia agree to commit murder, to kill children, to betray their country, to commit any number of atrocities on behalf of the underground brotherhood. There is one last test.

  “You are prepared, the two of you, to separate and never see one another again?” O’Brien finally asks.

  “No!” replies Julia at once.